AUSTIN, Texas—If you've ever asked yourself how long a Black Mirror episode might take to turn into real life, the new documentary People's Republic of Desire has an answer: roughly four years.

Really, the best way to describe this feature-length look at Chinese Internet streamers is to point to the British series' first-season episode "Fifteen Million Merits," which aired in 2011 and starred Get Out's Daniel Kaluuya. The episode imagined a future, Internet-driven popularity contest that tore people's lives apart. According to the filmmakers behind People's Republic of Desire, that episode's level of life-bending insanity had already unfolded in China by 2015, fueled largely by the millions-strong video-sharing site YY. And the results aren't pretty.

The result, with its millimeter-range focus on major YY personalities, deservedly won this week's South by Southwest jury prize for best documentary. Though it leaves some questions and topics unexplored, People's Republic of Desire still delivers a fascinating, character-driven story that Internet fans in the West should pay particular heed to—especially as live-streaming services develop and mature on our side of the Pacific.

After roughly three years of commercial viability, virtual reality seems to have excelled within a different realm than the one I typically wonder about: the film festival. Events like Sundance, Tribeca, and South By Southwest already overflow with weird, not-quite-accessible films about real-world drama, emotions, and nonsensical stories. And today, the only venue that fits those works better than arthouse theaters, quite frankly, is the ornate, vision-filling VR headset.

But filmmakers aren't just descending onto hardware like HTC Vive, Oculus Rift, and Samsung GearVR in a boring, flash-in-the-pan manner. At SXSW 2018 in particular, they're finally exhibiting a proficiency in two equally important extremes: what VR can sell that normal films cannot, and what VR must compromise or let go of for the sake of a better film experience.

I went eyes-on with nearly two dozen VR experiences at SXSW 2018, and I'll be honest, some of them were rough. Some filmmakers still think that a 360-degree video that forces viewers to crane their neck and hunt around for content is a good idea (geez, please stop making those). Others packed far too much visual noise or too many unnecessary interactions into a 3D world that never answered the important question of why its content and message was better in VR than on a flat screen.

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